SOMATIC THERAPY & CLINICAL SOMATICS for CHRONIC PAIN
“Our bodies contain our histories – every chapter, line, and verse, of every event and relationship in our lives.” – Caroline Myss
SOMATIC THERAPY, CLINICAL SOMATICS, and the BRAIN BODY BEING METHOD are integrative, body-based processes that work with the nervous system, helping clients to feel a sense of ease and wholeness again.
Over the course of our lives we naturally come into contact with stressful situations. When we have unprocessed trauma or activation, it gets stored in our bodies and prevents us from feeling safe and joyful. We can experience the effects of depression, chronic fatigue, PTSD, and anxiety, or we can feel a general sense of disconnectedness.
Maybe you’ve had major life trauma(s), or maybe you’ve experienced a string of events or relationships that have left you feeling stuck and weighed down.
Do you feel depleted, feel like something is missing, or do you just not feel like yourself?
Read on dear one….
WHAT I OFFER:
Somatic Therapy & Embodiment Sessions
1:1 sessions that work with the nervous system to support integration and release of past trauma. Open the door to a more easeful way of moving through the world with a new perspective. Lasting change and the capacity for joy is cultivated from the inside out.
Clinical Somatic Therapy and Education for Chronic Stress & Pain
Therapeutic 1:1 sessions work with the nervous system and brain/body connection to release chronic muscle tension caused by stress, injury, illness, surgery, movement patterns, or trauma.
A little about me: I am an E-RYT 200 hour Yoga Alliance Teacher (with certifications in Hatha, Vinyasa, Aerial Yoga, and Yin Yoga), 1:1 Somatic Coach, and Brain Body Being Facilitator.
I am currently completing certification as a Registered Clinical Somatic Therapist and Clinical Somatic Movement Educator.
I'm interested, but not sure which therapy is right for me. How do I pick a session?
Read on for more in-depth descriptions and information on clinical somatics. This is deeply intuitive work, guided by you, your body, and your nervous system’s capacity on a session by session basis. Everything is connected and there is no one way toward healing.
SOMATIC THERAPY & EMODIMENT SESSIONS
“Trauma is a fact of life. It does not, however, have to be a life sentance” – Peter Levine.
Clinical Somatic Therapy and the Brain Body Being method work with your body and your nervous system, teaching you how to self-regulate and self-soothe. Learn to create a sense of safety and freedom in your body.
Trauma can show up from a major life-threatening (or perceived life-threatening) event, or from cumulative stress. These events and traumas get “stored” in our tissues and cells, impacting how we respond to events in the future.
Our inability to move on from these stressors prevents us from living and moving through the world from a place of ease and resilience.
These trapped events can present as physical pain and body-based tensions that lead to movement patterns like frozen shoulder, sunken chest, back pain, loss of hip mobility, and so much more. They also lead to a general sense of dis-ease, loss of sleep, depression, anxiety, and eventually weaken the immune system resulting in chronic pain, fatigue, and illness.
In addition, these experiences can cause deeply rooted beliefs about ourselves that simply “changing our thinking” can’t resolve. We end up with pervasive inner thoughts like I’m not good enough, I’m not worthy, or I am not seen or heard. These narratives can emerge during stressful experiences or at times that seem totally unrelated.
In this way we can feel traumatized over and over again.
“Trauma compromises our ability to engage with others by replacing patterns of connection with patterns of protection” – Deb Dana
How does a body-based - or somatic approach - actually work?
Imagine a stressful or upsetting encounter you’ve had recently – can you recall the feeling in your body? Perhaps you experienced tension gripping at your shoulders, a clenching jaw, heat spreading across your chest, your heart rate accelerates, your belly tightens….
When we become locked in our fight and flight response, we are constantly scanning for the next threat.
We experience an increase in blood sugar, blood pressure, tunnel vision, braced muscles, shallow breath, and a weakened immune system, among other things. When we are operating in survival mode, physical symptoms, illness, and long term effects take hold.
We close off from our body and our feelings as a means of self preservation, but in protecting ourselves from the next danger we are also numb to any future joy.
Unlike our animal kin, we have lost the ability to easily release the effects of these stressors. A bunny that evades the jaws of a coyote doesn’t spend the rest of its day worrying about it. It literally shakes off the “charge” of adrenalin and cortisol in its nervous system and continues on.
Talk therapy is very useful, but it stops short of processing what lives in the body. You are being asked to change your thinking, but these patterns need to be resolved in the body, not the mind.
Somatic therapy works directly with these trapped events to resolve them, release them, and teach you how to create more resilience to release them in the future. Techniques such as breath awareness, meditation, body scans, interoceptive awareness, education, building a somatic toolkit of resources, and more, will be supportive in processing these feelings of stuck-ness.
Life consists of many ups and downs. We can’t prevent stressful events from occurring. We can, however learn to navigate them with grace and ease.
Somatic therapy brings you back into relationship with your body and feel your innate capacity to heal.
What does a Somatic Therapy Session look like?
When you book your first session with me you will receive an intake questionnaire to fill out, you are welcome to answer as little or as much of it as you feel comfortable sharing. Before our first session we’ll schedule a 15 minute Zoom call to meet, get familiar with one another, and gives us an idea of where we could begin.
All of this is flexible and can change on any day depending on where the body leads us and the capacity of your nervous system.
A session could begin with us orienting to the space we are in to establish a sense of grounding and safety. Or we could turn our awareness inwards to orient to what is happening inside the body. We are learning to stretch our ability to be with the body and not supress or bypass difficult sensations. We are also building trust through locating the spaces we feel really good and open, rather than focusing on the spaces of dis-ease.
We could implement exercises and explorations that bring you into your body to notice areas of past “charge” and locked stress. When capacity allows, we can process and release these charges. We can also pendulate between comfort and discomfort, focus on breath, discuss resourcing using memories, people, places, and activities, that illicit a sense of safety in your body.
Sessions are highly experiential and focus on supporting you and your unique physiology. We may delve into education about the nervous system, quantum theory, or see how our world view was being shaped before we were even born! We might explore breathwork, meditation, gentle movement, Qi Gong inspired practices, yoga nidra, or some more creative outlets.
You will learn to build a SOMATIC TOOLBOX of things to support yourself on a daily basis.
There are so many ways to come back to your body. It’s our partnership that will help YOU to uncover what your body has been asking for – to be seen, heard, and felt.
CLINICAL SOMATIC EDUCATION AND THERAPY FOR CHRONIC PAIN & STRESS
“Pain is a powerful word that triggers strong feelings – fear, anger, helplessness, panic, and even grief. If you’re one of the millions of people struggling with pain as you read this sentence, you are most certainly not alone. What mystifies patients, loved ones, and treating professionals alike is why pain persists long after an injury has healed, lingering for no apparent reason”
(Freedom from Pain, Peter A. Levine and Maggie Phillips)
The puzzle of pain involves a myriad of overlapping factors like emotion, sensations, nutrition, culture, socio-economic status, individual experience, genetics, spiritual meaning, and habitual patterns. Many experts believe that chronic stress and fatigue have become the dis-ease itself.
Stress, injury, illness, and chronic pain are not arbitrary occurrences – they are our nervous system’s way of letting us know that something isn’t right in our body so we can tend to that imbalance. All of us have innate healing abilities which begin with awareness – awareness of posture, alignment, bracing, thought, emotion, and habit.
Listening to our body and nervous system has an enormous impact on how we deal with pain and how we interact with the world at large. We’ve been taught things like “walk it off” and “play through the pain” rather than actually listening to what our brilliant body is trying to tell us. Maybe you are experiencing stomach issues from eating something inflammatory, pain from shoes that compromise how you walk, headaches or TMJ from stress, or any number of postural imbalances from how you sleep, sit, and perform repetitive tasks.
As we grow we repeat certain movements or tasks – that muscular pattern then becomes habitual. After some time these habits become so engrained in our body that we no longer even think about them – like brushing your teeth. (Fun exercise: try brushing your teeth with the opposite hand).
We have created muscle memory.
Muscle memory is extremely useful to provide efficiency in our day, but if we are performing tasks in a way that is stressful or damaging, then we are baking harmful patterns into our very tissues.
How does Clinical Somatic Exercise work?
“During the course of our lives, our sensory-motor systems continually respond to daily stresses and traumas with specific muscular reflexes. These reflexes, repeatedly triggered, create habitual muscular contractions, which we cannot – voluntarily – relax. These muscular contractions have become so deeply involuntarily and unconscious that, eventually, we no longer remember how to move about freely. The result is stiffness, soreness, and a restricted range of movement.” – Thomas Hanna, From “Somatics”.
Clinical Somatic Exercises (CSEs) focus on sensory motor re-training to relieve muscle tensions with extremely slow and gentle movements.
This method teaches YOU how to take back control of your body and awaken the ability to heal and self-correct. A main tenet of Clinical Somatics is the belief that you don’t need to rely on others to maintain your health.
CSEs also focus on stress and our nervous system. Our nervous system is how we learn to use our body, so the postural effects of our fight/flight/freeze responses can get learned as muscle memory when we are faced with prolonged stressors and anxiety.
When we are activated by stress – or perceived threat – we experience muscle recruitment in order to prepare us to run or fight. If we continue to experience stress over longer periods of time, we aren’t able to easily discharge those activations, thus layering one unresolved trauma upon the next.
Somatics has a name for the resulting chronic and involuntary muscle tightness – this is SENSORY MOTOR ANMESIA.
SENSORY MOTOR ANMESIA (or SMA)
SMA happens when your brain has forgotten how to sense and move some of your muscles.
After a prolonged amount of time spent in a nervous system stress response – this could be traffic, work deadlines, family/relational conflict, social media, current events – our brain resets our baseline muscle tonicity and forgets how to relax fully.
This means your muscles are now exerting unnecessary energy resulting in poor movement patterns, exhaustion, more stress, nerve issues, pain, inflammation, and eventually injury and illness.
Imagine how a constantly tense muscle would eventually feel stiff, sore, and tired, limiting your freedom of movement. A tired muscle is a weak muscle. At some point when muscles fatigue they can no longer exert the same amount of force.
CSEs help you to remember or re-learn how to feel and move those muscles again.
“The myth that your body will inevitably break down and that you must experience pain as you age is so ingrained that you’ve probably never stopped to wonder why this breakdown occurs and if it might be avoidable. As a result, the scientific research around pain is devoted to developing new drugs that simply manage pain conditions and new surgical techniques that fix worn-out joints instead of investigating the underlying causes of physical decline.” (The Pain Relief Secret, Sarah Warren)
How can Clinical Somatic Exercise change my life?
- sleep more comfortably and uninterrupted
- reduce stress, tension, and anxiety
- prevent future and reoccurring injury
- prevent joint degradation and damage
- reduce or eliminate headaches and jaw pain
- improve breathing
- increase range of motion
- improve balance
- alleviate existing pain from illness or injury
- feel at home in your body again… or for the first time!
This sounds like just what I need!
